I have probably quoted sufficient to show that Postmaster General Hitchcock is _reaching_ for power and authority _which should not be delegated to any bureau or cabinet head_. The last statement is made, of course, in the confident belief that the reader joins me in the desire and _confident_ hope that the basic principles of our government will be neither superseded nor abrogated by legislative grants of bureaucratic power and authority, which power and authority once granted is _seldom or never recovered to a people without sanguinary action on their part_, with all the waste of effort, vitality, money and human life usually a concomitant of such action.
There are several more of Postmaster General Hitchcock’s legislative recommendations I would like to quote, did space permit, but there is one other which I will quote, because it wears a sort of humoresque drapery when taken in connection with that “rider” Mr. Hitchcock so industriously tried to put through the necessary three-ring stunts required in the senatorial circus; also when taken in connection with a little, not separately stitched, _brochure_ which Mr. Hitchcock turns loose on pages 7 and 8 of his most excellent, _though ulteriorly tutoring, report_.
On pages 7 and 8 the Postmaster General tells us, as best he can, under _influenced and influencing conditions_, the why and wherefore for his attempt to load his department deficit onto a few periodicals which he, likewise certain of his “influencers” possibly, does not like. Well, I want my readers to _read_ this bit of official effort, _in a wrong cause_. I want them to read it in the _raw_, with no spring papering or decorating on it.
As has been my practice in quoting, I shall take occasion to italicize a little. But that will not cut any four-leaf clovers this early in the season. I italicize merely to call the reader’s attention to the elegant _assertiveness_ of Mr. Hitchcock’s “style” and to his _planned_ determination to “put it over” on those pestiferous periodicals--weekly and monthly--in spite of _constitutional prohibitions_, Senate rules or publishers’ opposition.
Stay! I have another reason for italicizing. I want the reader to read those italicized phrasings of Mr. Hitchcock’s unstitched _brochure_ a _second_ time, and to read them more carefully the _second_ time than he did the first. If the reader will kindly do this we will be better acquainted, also be mutually better acquainted with Mr. Hitchcock and his dominating purpose, whether _ulterior_ or other, in attacking a special class or division of periodical publications in order to recoup a deficit _created wholly by the rural delivery service and by the free_ (franked and penalty), _service rendered by his department_. We will first quote his little second-class _brochure_ and follow it with his humoresque legislative recommendation: